The following relates generally to home control systems and, more particularly, relates to a system and associated methods for controlling and operating a plurality of home appliances from a variety of different locations in a networked home control and automation environment.
Current home appliances and associated remote controls (“legacy” appliances) have limited functional abilities and minimal interoperability features. Emerging advances in wireless and distributed computing technologies, coupled with network enabled home appliances (such as those that may be addressed, accessed, monitored, and managed remotely over networks and the Internet) and industry wide interoperability standards (e.g., Universal Plug and Play (“UPnP”) and Home Audio Video interoperability (“HAVi”) standards) provide a rough framework for network enabled home environments having increasingly integrated home control capabilities, functions, and features. A background and overview of home interoperability technologies and projected features may be found in the Intel Technical Journal, Volume 6, Issue 4, published Nov. 15, 2002 entitled “Interoperable Home Infrastructure” which is fully incorporated by reference herein.
Though promising in their goals and objectives, the UPnP, HAVi, Intel Interoperability Infrastructure, etc. do not currently provide for many advanced control based features relating to networked home control and automation environments. Accordingly, it is desired to provide a system and method that functions to enable advanced home control features such as location based control setup and operation, network enabled legacy appliances and system integration, save and recall capabilities for appliance and media states, generic command based appliance controls, dynamic/complex macro command generation, and Internet based control capabilities from remote locations. Additional inventive features and functions will also be evident from the home appliance control system and methods hereinafter described.